Britain’s creeping authoritarianism

When a top Edinburgh school announced earlier this month that it would stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, citing the novel’s ‘white saviour motif’ and use of the n-word, the response ranged from uproar to bafflement.

We may be living in increasingly censorious times, it seems, but banning books, even just on a school’s curriculum, still has a bad smell around it.

Well, perhaps not for much longer. In an alarming new poll, conducted for The Spectator by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, 40 per cent of respondents said they supported the UK government censoring books with content that it deems sexist, homophobic or racist. Just 30 per cent were opposed while 24 per cent would neither support nor oppose it.

Presumably the British public won’t be clamouring for books like Harper Lee’s classic to be cancelled — not least because To Kill a Mockingbird is actually an anti-racist book, a detail that seems to have escaped the philistines who work at Edinburgh’s James Gillespie’s High School.